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FRIENDS AND ALLIES 39
Collaboration with Washington was also hard because
American sigint was a house divided. Although William
Friedman, the US Army's best cryptologist, was busy advocating
sigint cooperation with the British in early 1940, the US Navy's
chief code-breaker, Commander Laurance Safford, was
adamantly set against working with allies. But after pressure
from President Franklin D. Roosevelt the Navy had been won
round, and the Americans sent a team of technical experts to
Britain in early 1941. Known as the 'Sinkov Mission', they spent
several weeks touring Bletchley Park and visiting outlying intercept
stations. The British were willing to receive them because
they knew the main focus of American attention was Japan.
At this stage the British were keen to keep discussions focused
on Japan, because this allowed them to hide the extent of their
knowledge of the German Enigma system. Both Sir Stewart
Menzies and Sir Alexander Cadogan were adamant that the
Ultra secret would not be shared with the Americans. 35 Laurance
Safford later represented the first Anglo-American exchanges
of late 1940 and early 1941 as a one-way street in which the
Americans handed over their precious 'Magic' material on Japan
but got nothing in return. In fact this is far from the case.
Prescott Currier, one of the Americans who came to Bletchley
in early 1941, recalled: 'All of us were permitted to come and
go freely and to visit and talk with anyone in any area that
interested US.'36 Later that year, a select circle of American codebreakers
were also given more details about Enigma. 37
The hottest issue was the distribution of sigint to the policymakers.
In late May 1941, Brigadier Raymond Lee, the American
Military Attache in London, conveyed an American request for
comprehensive intelligence exchange in the Far East. There
followed painfully slow and complex discussions about who would
get sigint with what levels of security: 'The whole thing has been
so tangled up,' he complained. 38 Sigint was also very confused
in Washington. Unlike Britain's GC&CS, American signals intelligence
was less centrally organised, resulting in great rivalry
between the armed services. 39 Because the American wartime